


Life Goes On

by Asimiento



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 12:22:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17324933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asimiento/pseuds/Asimiento
Summary: Earth, as it turns out, is not all that different from Cardassia.





	Life Goes On

**Author's Note:**

> Reality demands  
> that we also mention this:  
>  _Life goes on._  
>  It continues at Cannae and Borodino,  
> at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.
> 
> Perhaps all fields are battlefields,  
> those we remember  
> and those that are forgotten.
> 
> What moral flows from this? Probably none.  
> Only that blood flows, drying quickly,  
> and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.
> 
> On tragic mountain passes  
> the wind rips hats from unwitting heads  
> and we can’t help  
> laughing at that.
> 
> — **Wislawa Szymborska** (Selected sections from **Reality Demands** , _Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh_ )

Earth, as it turns out, is not all that different from Cardassia Prime.

The city of Paris is a marvel of historic preservation. Richly moulded stone with a weathered ivory cast, deep brass roofs turned bright seafoam green with age, windows furnished with an ornamental charm lost to humanity in the few centuries of its committed shift to interior progress. For some reason, the people of the modern age had only seen fit to retain the draconian uniformity that spanned the full sweep of the city and beyond. It was the only thing recognizable from a storied time of romance. Romance and bloodshed, apparently. Centuries ago, a single man ordered swathes be cut through the labyrinthine map of the city’s old bones, forcing its masses to the margins, weaving into its architecture an insidious, nearly inescapable trap—a caste system.

That is, at least, according to the apparently very capable tour guide, putting on a show for an audience of one. An amateur tour guide, who had never once even been to Paris, had never even heard of it until nine Bajoran planetary cycles ago, had even feigned disinterest when the suggestion was made, yet is now somehow practically aglow, dressing the city down with such quixotic glee as to seem, to the keenest observer, on the verge of psychotic. Even dressed in layers upon layers, bundled up in the thickest of scarves, head half-obscured by the most ridiculous woolen hat, dressed for the dead of winter at the height of spring, his barbs had not blunted in the least.

Oh, Garak must be loving this.

“Now, the Haussmann Renovation barely scratches the surface. Your people have left in their wake a veritable museum of ghosts. With the grotesque history of the French Empire, my dear, I had no idea beneath all that supposed Federation moral ascendancy, humanity was capable of such…”

The last word is drawn out, dangling like bait.

“Cognitive dissonance?” Julian hastily offers.

“Hypocrisy,” Garak says, with breathless delight.

Where was he even going with this?

“Oh come on, that was ancient history! Humans aren’t hypocrites just because centuries ago the French were so damned—”

A passerby swings around and throws them a look. Garak parries with his most diplomatic smile. Julian attempts an approximation, which only looks like he’s valiantly restraining himself from flying off the handle.

Self-restraint has been the day’s theme.

“I suppose you’d like to say more about these monuments to human vanity,” Julian sighs, gesturing with hyperbolic gusto to generally everywhere, and nowhere in particular.

A professorial wave of the hand arises from the apparent expert on human history. “Oh, but vanity is putting it lightly.”

On this day, Julian has learned that centuries ago, the city of Paris was built on hell. From a Cardassian. A bored Cardassian who just happened to read a bloody book on the way to Earth. Mortifyingly, Julian never even bothered looking any of this up, when he lived on Earth. He'd been too busy thinking about getting out of the damn planet.

Awful to look at anything beautiful that could only come out of monstrous ambition.

They’re by the Seine, now. Julian looks down at the perfectly clear water, where the richly ornate structures line up in reverse, slipping along the rippling surface into a funhouse mirror vision of the city. A vertiginous nightmare version, which is somehow closer to the one that’s just been exuberantly described to him.

He might jump, if Garak keeps this up. He really might.

He makes a sharp turn to avoid walking into the church just ahead. He’d rather skip the tired Cardassian-standard lamenting on primitive thinking. So the Notre Dame’s a wonder? He’ll give it a pass. He’s endured enough slagging off Bajorans from Dukat, thanks. Well, even Cardassians once flocked to creeds, maybe there was some opening here but… no. He's exhausted. There was a time when he would have been the one to throw fire to the kindling. When he would’ve persisted, throwing himself as passionately into the depthless, savage inquiry to peel back that clockwork mind as he had with crises and investigation that demanded the full force of his ability.

Now, he’s mostly hoping this pivots back into the date they once agreed it would be. Hopefully with less gloating.

He turns to Garak, who is now looking down at the Seine, giving it what seems to be the full weight of his intense regard, silently marveling at the long stretch of water and its secret mirror city, with a seriousness he’d somehow not seen fit to grant the rest of the godforsaken place.

He has no idea when they've swerved to sobriety, but he supposes they were headed there, in some way. Despite all the years of vapid posturing back on Deep Space Nine, one clear fact had been impossible to obfuscate: Garak does not take anything lightly.

“My dear, there is no point to obscuring the past.”

There’s a grimness to the Cardassian’s voice that seems to come out of nowhere. Julian can’t help but laugh at that. He snorts. Garak raises a quizzical eyeridge at him.

Julian doesn't know how to respond. His mind hasn't made the transition. So, he just blinks, eyes closing longer than necessary, conjunctiva hauled over cornea with high resistance, as if to sweep out a heavy glaze. He drags a palm over his face. “I’m afraid I’m just ignorant in this department,” he groans.

“Oh, but I didn’t mean you.”

That professorial hand gestures expansively to the rest of the city. Julian’s eyes follow the path it traces over the horizon. The view is, objectively, wonderful. Awesome, in the old-fashioned, religious sense of the word—beautiful and terrible to behold.

Incredible. Frightening. Complicated. Exactly like Elim Garak, Julian supposes.

Suddenly, like a non-sequitur being forced in by some eavesdropping cosmic force, a loud rumble comes from the clouds, and rain begins to pour.

They make it to the façade of a closed-down café, huddling under the awning. Garak’s drenched hat and scarf cling to his face comically, so Julian peels them off and does his best not to laugh at his companion, who’d been flush with hubris one moment, then crumpled into a childlike, shivering mess in the next.

“Dearest, how are we liking our tour of Paris?”

Through chattering teeth, Garak responds, “it could certainly stand to be more temperate.” He attempts to send a message for a transport vehicle, but his drenched gloves slide over the mobile’s surface.

The sight of it is so strange and amusing that Julian considers just letting him persist. Instead, he merely takes the mobile, puts in the request, pries off his gloves, one slippery finger at a time. As the transport’s headlights come into view, Julian takes Garak’s hand and kisses the soft skin of his palm—a Cardassian and human gesture, at once.

From the speeding transport’s window, the whole city is a blur of light and color, stippled and splotched and morphed into an abstract haze, like paint flowing over the view in broad strokes.

“It must have been difficult,” Garak says, apropos of nothing.

“What was?” Julian asks.

The rain taps a steady rhythm on the window— a crowd spilling out, creating signs of life.

“Changing.”

Outside, the wind sighs. People run to shelter. Parisian ghosts dance to the rising fog. The sky pours its music. Life goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> This was an exercise written while procrastinating on a much longer effort, something that explores similar themes, but in hopefully not as blunt a fashion. I'm not really one for subtlety but hey, neither is Star Trek. 
> 
> I'm [Coranum](http://coranum.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, if you'd like to say hi.


End file.
